Nostalgia is a poor guide to the post-COVID future

Some people want to get back to the happy times where students were buzzing around the campus, faculty had passionate debates in person, when grass was greener, and the sun shone brighter. That is all good and dandy, for we all need some energy to keep going forward. However, nostalgic feelings prevent us from being more realistic, more specific about the future. It stands in the way of actual serious planning of the post-COVID world.

Nostalgia is just a feeling, not a roadmap. Some conservatives create a version of the past that never existed: with full families, innocent teenagers, and wholesome TV shows. They attach their personal warm feelings to the made-up picture of the golden age and try to get there somehow. Just to be fair, not all conservatives do that. Some are also pushing a specific version of the future, not tied to any specific version of the past. They want to preserve certain principles, not their own rich imagination.

OK, back to the universities. As the first step, let us acknowledge that some of its operations will stay online. Student crowds will be thinner, although perhaps as joyful. Students will not come to campus to get advice, to turn it a paper form, or two attend every single class. Moreover, different students will have different preferences. The young and single would want to spend more time on campus, while those older and with their own families – less. Following that pattern, staff and faculty will spend less time on campus, and work more from home. Again, some jobs require no on-campus presence, while others will remain pretty much as before. We may avoid building more classrooms (for most classes will be hybrid) and more offices (those can be shared by partial telecommuters).

Planning is about nuance, about differentiation. It uses a different kind of imagination. Nostalgia is too wholistic, too undifferentiated to be useful. It assumes an average student, an average faculty and staff member. Such people do not exist. Let us get a little more realistic, a little more specific. Let us use our differences to our collective advantage. This is actually a very good time to start a conversation on re-imagining the future. We all learned much about ourselves, our preferences, our jobs, and technologies that help us. Going back while blinded by nostalgia is not much of an option.

Modality and morality or Do not go back to normal if it was abnormal

There we go again. I felt smug about figuring out a perfect solution, only to realize it does not work in real life. In ASL, facial expressions are an essential part of the language. Wearing a mask makes it very difficult to communicate. Face shields tend to fog up and they have a glare problems. I thought we would keep ASL interpreters on Zoom, and project the Zoom onto the large screen for meetings – and pipe any presentation through the same Zoom window. All participants, on Zoom and in the room would see the same thing, and the interpreter would not have to wear a mask. So, Binod, Michele, Leah and I went in to test the hypothesis. We tried our most advanced media studio room.

Here is how it went:
- What happens when a Deaf person from the audience wants to speak at a meeting? I need to see them up close, - says Michele, our interpreter.
- They will sign into a special laptop station with a camera. For equity, all speakers will have to come up to that station to speak.
- That’s a lot of commotion for everyone to come up to the speaking station, even to ask a quick question.
- OK, what if everyone will have a laptop and be logged into Zoom at the same time?
- Multiple Zoom sessions will create audio feedback, bunch of echoes – we learned that last year.
- OK, they will all be muted, and the room mics will pick up their speech.
- I imagine bunch of people in the room, each staring at and speaking/signing into their laptops… Why did they come f2f to begin with?
- [Silence]

This is just a small part of that testing exercise. At some point, we realized that someone had to be essentially a camera operator, and make sure the right picture is on screen and in Zoom. We have to develop a process where people on Zoom would feel as included in the conversation as people in the room – same opportunity to speak, same level of empowerment to affect the outcome of the meeting. In other words, every little problem has a solution. However, in aggregate, they are too much to overcome. Every little thing can go wrong. And it is too much to handle for whoever facilitates those meetings. Since I lead the College meetings, it would be me. I am not tech-shy at all, but that would be too much even for me.

Do not always listen to techno-optimists. Sometimes the technology is simply not there. The techies are trained to think how to solve problems. It is very difficult for them to say “sorry, we cannot solve this problem yet.” They will keep thinking about yet another camera, another powerful microphone, another trick to match displays, etc. Interestingly, the ed tech industry have been working on the problem of split classrooms for decades, so it is very hard for them to admit the problem has not been yet solved. It may be one day, like in Sci-Fi movies, where you are talking to a hologram, and are not aware this is not an actual human being. But we are very far from that.

Here is a really profound question for you. Why do we want to get back to f2f “normal” meetings? Because we enjoy the full spectrum of sensory experiences - an occasional short chat, a glimpse of other people, an aside joke, the body language, the energy of the room. But many of those things are inaccessible to Deaf and hard of hearing, to people with limited vision, with a difficulty processing facial expressions, not fluent in the working language, etc. What is fun for an able-bodied person is exactly the thing that excludes others.

Zoom is also incredibly limiting, but it is limiting to everyone in about the same way. At least we figured out how to make the interpreter visible. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the auto-captioning is actually OK: not as good as the best human captioner, but better than a terrible one. We learned that zoom-based meeting are not as much fun, but they do the job – things get discussed, and decisions made. Now, tell me, on balance, would you trade fun for most for more inclusion for all?

Moreover, the split modality will create a new underclass of people who cannot come. The very nature of the duel (split) modality puts the two groups of participants in two very different positions. It is impossible to provide equal opportunity and equal experience for both. By the way the few faculty that tried to teach the split classroom (we call it HyFlex here) all hated it. It requires too much effort from the instructor and takes attention away from teaching. Add accommodation for disability to this already very difficult task, and this is a recipe for disaster.

Now, when we go back completely back to normal, and not driving to a meeting will be indeed a preference, then we do not owe that much to people who chose to stay home. We can provide marginal participation opportunity for them, as a courtesy. If you want full participation – come here. But we are not in that world yet. People who do not come may have medical concerns for themselves, and their families. It looks like Zoom meetings are here to stay for some time. And even then, why go back to normal that has been exclusionary? How do we redefine the normal, so it works for more people? It may be the case that Zoom meetings are here to stay for a long time.

From the dictatorship of tests to a new educator preparation framework

It took a global pandemic to start undoing the damage done by the regime of teacher preparation that can be describes as over-under-regulation. A whole succession of federal policies is largely responsible for it: The No Child Left Behind, the Rate to the Top and the NCLB waiver regime. The Fed finally got out of the business of reforming education, but states continue to demonstrate significant inertia.

The regime consisted of two somewhat mutually exclusive pillars. The first is imposing multiple regulatory hurdles on the individual teacher candidate. No, it is not enough to finish high school; you must also pass a basic skills test. No, it is not enough to get a major from an accredited university; you must also pass a subject-matter knowledge test. And in many states, including California, you also must pass either a reading test, or somethings else to appease some crazy lobbyist still shock-shelled after the ancient Reading Wars. If the first pillar is about over-regulation, the second one is the opposite: let anyone, any school district or a local brewery open their own teacher preparation program, as long as they comply with some basic rules. That was a response to the conservative attacks on teacher preparation institutions in the University. We were called “Too theoretical” (read “Too social justice-oriented”).

Now the dictatorship of tests has started to crumble simply because during the pandemic, there was no way to administer all these tests, and states had to show some flexibility. And guess what – the sky did not fall on earth. This is beyond just teacher preparation; the entire duopoly of SAT/ACT is unraveling right before our eyes. Many universities had removed them from admission requirements, and guess what? – Yes you guessed it right, nothing terrible happened or is likely to happen. If anything, elite universities may become a little more diverse

What should state governments do? Right now, they are simply suspending or abandoning the most burdensome and non-sensical requirements. However, this time of change calls for a more comprehensive, more intentional shift in regulating teacher preparation. Both the intent of the new policy and its content should be constructed with the full use of research base, but also with the clarity of values connected to public interest.

One approach would be to prioritize diversification of the profession and encouraging professional self-regulation. For states like California, with rapidly changing demographics, the former is no brainer. The latter may be a bit more controversial, for we are asking our officials to overcome decades of suspicion toward teacher preparation programs. However, in our business professional ethics had always worked better than external controls. I’ve been at it for over 30 years. Every single time when we managed to improve something was because my colleagues wanted it to happen, not because someone told them what to do. Ethics is a material tangible asset. As far as regulatory tools go, shame and pride are much more powerful than accountability and compliance.

1. Radical expansion of access. Right now, admission to teacher preparation program in almost every state is a nightmare of hoop-jumping exercise. The profession is just not welcoming to anyone, especially to candidates of color and to first generation in college.
2. In admissions to credential programs:
• Expanding ways of demonstrating subject matter mastery based on academic credentials earned plus possibly some review of transcripts.
• Abandon basic skills testing. It does not exist for other professions. If regionally accredited higher ed institutions give bachelor degrees to people without basic literacy skills, let’s fix the higher education accreditation. But stop suspecting every future teacher of being illiterate.
• Valuing cultural competency and lived experiences as well as subject matter knowledge. It is not that difficult to achieve. Take into consideration the exposure to diversity in high school experience, fluency in a second language, experiences of living abroad, etc – such forms of cultural capital are important for future teachers.
3. In awarding credentials, move away from blanket EDTPA control to assessing a random sample of candidates. We helped Pearson collect hundreds of millions of dollars from struggling students, for a well over a decade now. Isn’t this time for them to show that EDTPA actually predicts teacher performance in the classroom? Is there proof that it does? If they still cannot do that after all this time, perhaps we should think of some other way of external validation for teacher preparation programs? The evidence so far is very mixed (Goldhaber et.al 2017) or negative (Greenblatt 2015).
4. In program approval, most states and CAPE use meaningless procedures like looking for places in syllabi where a certain ill-considered standard element is introduced, taught, or assessed. This ritual has nothing to do with research, nor does it reflect the real strengths or weaknesses of the program under review. The standards are made by a consensus of random experts and determined by each expert stamina more than their expertise. Almost none of the teacher preparation standards have any research base to rely on. And this is no secret – everyone in the know knows that. What works in program approval is when colleagues from other institutions come and look into what we do. States should keep and strengthen the peer-review part of the process, and radically reduce the mindless compliance activities resulting in thousands of pages of paperwork.

I am not going to insist these exact approaches should be used. However, I am certain state governments need new frameworks, some coherent strategy on what to do with its educator workforce and educator preparation.

References

Goldhaber, D., Cowan, J., & Theobald, R. (2017). Evaluating prospective teachers: Testing the predictive validity of the edTPA. Journal of Teacher Education, 68(4), 377-393.

Greenblatt, D., & O'Hara, K. E. (2015). Buyer Beware: Lessons Learned from EdTPA Implementation in New York State. Teacher Education Quarterly, 42(2), 57-67.

Can a university stop planning?

One of the most basic assumptions of all management is that one has to plan. One of the key functions of management is the ability to predict the future and prepare resources, information, procedures, and plans to make that future more successful. That assumption has been working for universities for a long time, until suddenly the future became unpredictable. So we get caught into a vicious circle of predicting planning, then abandoning the previous plans, because of the new virus variant, or some other unexpected health data. The problem is not only with our time wasted on multiple preparations for things that never happened. The problem is also with communications: we lose just a little bit of credibility every time we are forced to let go yet another solid plan.

Wilson in his classic Bureaucracy describes how a significantly outmanned German Army defeated most European armies and almost defeated the Soviet Union in the early 1940-s. Their murderous ideology aside, the German military had understood something the rest of the world did not. Instead of detailed plans of massive military operations, they gave field commanders just most general objectives, and allowed to improvise. The highly mobile infantry and tank units penetrated the best organized defense lines, and used a number of various flexible tactics to win. The Soviet Army was especially vulnerable because in a totalitarian society, everyone waited for Stalin to approve all moves. BY the time у got the message and woke up late, the situation on the frontline changed dramatically, and a new directive became irrelevant.

In the normal times, universities derive many advantages from centralized delivery of most essential services. It makes a lot of economic and practical sense. However, we are not in normal times. Perhaps a little more decentralization would actually make their various departments and programs more flexible, and better handle the changing landscape. However, such a shift is very difficult to achieve. Top-heavy hierarchical systems are accustomed to governing from the top. Avoiding universal decisions makes top leadership feel like there are dodging their responsibilities. And this is not a criticism – all managers feel that the best decisions are made at their own levels. While I expect to have more authority at the College level, I am not in rush to grant the same to our chairs. Of course, we are small enough to talk a lot, and make most of the decisions collectively. Still it is important to remember the limitations imposed by my own vantage point.

It is not productive to blame the system for doing what it knows how to do. Once we return to normal levels of predictability, it will become more functional yet again. After all, we are not at war, and there is significant cost to everyone running its own guerilla operations. My answer in general is no, universities cannot stop planning. However, a little decentralization during the time of unpredictability would be helpful.

Life, dignity, and the vaccine

Yearning for respect fuels irrational thinking. Someone propelling an “alternative” reality is simply telling us: “my opinion is just as valuable as yours.” Our disagreement does not make the yearning to go away. If you wish to convince these people, address their unspoken underlying message, not what they are actually saying.

Our politicians and health officials often unreasonably assume that all people value human life above everything else, especially the lives of others. That is a manifestly false assumption. Millions of people sacrifice their own lives and lives of others for dignity or another higher goal. The culture of solidarity differs from the culture of dignity. I know how generic it sounds, but there is some truth to it. People may belong to the culture of dignity because they have been experiencing lack of it for whatever reasons – real or imagined. And not everyone belongs to the culture of solidarity, that much we know for sure.

In the debate about masks or vaccines, it is not certain death that is being considered, but a risk of disease and death. In this probabilistic version of the dilemma, even people who value life in general, are willing to take some risk if on the other side of the scale is something very important to them. People like me accept science without giving up a shred of my dignity. To the contrary, we take pride in the ability to weigh in and accept evidence. However, assuming others are like you is the cardinal ethical failing. If you were told all your life that you are stupid and must listen to scientists who know better – who knows, you might have developed a thing about it. The insecurity about dignity may have colored your perception. The power-laden context of convincing is not indifferent to the matter about which we try to convince. Those who believe that truth is independent of power relations have slept through their philosophy classes.

From the public policy standpoint, throwing more and more evidence at antivaxxers will not work. The more of it you present, the more defensive mechanisms will be activated. Incentives are a much more promising approach. If you cast vaccination into transactional terms, it removes some of the challenges for the dignity culture. The transaction is voluntary: I still do not believe in your stupid vaccine, but I will take the incentive. Paradoxically, the direct mandate may work better as well: I do not believe in your stupid vaccine, but I need my job. It is the gentle persuasion based on facts that does not work. Or, to be more precise, it may have worked until we encounter the group of resisters strongly motivated by the culture of dignity. Some of them will never budge. Others may be swayed.

My so-called one-armed life

On Wednesday, I was starting my short pathetic jog with the dog, tripped over nothing, cracked my arm, and sprained both wrists. “Happens a lot,” – reassured the friendly ER nurse. She did not have to say it: her quick, habitual moves to encase my broken arm said it all. The guy who got out of my Uber before I got in had an identical cast on his arm. The universe never fails to remind how not special you are.

It is not the pain; pain is bearable, especially with the very serious drugs for which a pharmacist wants an ID and a little interrogation. It is the host of little indignities that the injury brings along for a house party. For example, it is absolutely impossible to make a ponytail with one hand’ just try it. I even googled it; one brave girl figured it out and shared in YouTube. I could not repeat the maneuver no matter how hard I tried. Or how do you take out the dog if neither of your hands can hold a 100 pounds of muscle with only a small but excitable brain, intrigued by every turkey and squirrel he meets? The answer is – tie the leash to your belt. It works great (minus the neighbors’ looks) until the belt breaks and a dignified bearded gentleman with splinted arms and bad hair has to make it home while also preventing his shorts from falling down.

The opioid gives you very vivid dreams, like in the movies. However, you pay with a tremendous hangover, worse than the $8 vodka in plastic bottle from my youth. The headache is OK for e-mails, but not for writing a book of any value. Dictation works instead of typing, but it actually slower. You must formulate a whole sentence in your mind before writing it down. And say “period” and “comma” all the time. It is not like normal speaking; it is more like writing with your mouth – needs getting used to. I cannot take a pot of soup out of the fridge; instead, I need to take the bowl and the ladle into the fridge and do the whole operation inside.

Of course, human beings get used to anything, anything at all. We learn, find new tricks, invent workarounds, accommodate, assimilate, adapt. That is what we do. I am still thinking of that girl who lost her arm in an accident and had enough compassion for others to record a video on the one-handed ponytail move. I am grateful – to her and to the universe for my inconvenience is just temporary. Let’s think of those who cannot just wait their disability out. If you have any sympathy for me, give it to them instead.

Relation-Centered Education Network conference

Last weekend and on Monday, I spent some 30 hours on Zoom, attending the first full conference of the relation-centered education network (RCEN). It started out as a conversation. Ann-Louise Ljungblad, a Swedish researcher and I were having lunch in Oslo in May 2019. Both of us were interested in educational relations. It occurred to me that there are hundreds of other people around the world that are interested in the same thing, and we never talk to each other. Very few pleasures in life compare to turning an idea into reality. We all secretly crave creation.

Two years later, here we are, a conference with 47 presentation by people from 18 different countries. When you meet an old friend, there is a way of skipping the chitchat, and going straight to real things that matter, like life, love, and loss. That is how this conference felt to me. There is a tribe out there that is just coming to self-awareness. We all share the assumption that education is more about human relations than about anything else. Sharing basic assumptions improves the quality of conversations.

I was also in awe of the great arch of scholarship made visible. It had philosophers with their power of abstraction, along with a psychometrician discussing the Cronbach’s alpha. The conference included qualitative researchers, an art presentation, and several practitioners talking about their work with youth. At an interdisciplinary conference like this, you can see how concepts turn into stories, stories into studies, studies into practices, practices into measuring instruments, instruments into policies, etc. There is a great comfort in discipline-based scholarly communities. Interdisciplinarity may be annoying for we all have different conventions and standards and conventions. However, it also provides a wider view. The great arch of knowledge is rarely visible; we tend to see out small slice of it. But it does exist.

Scholarship can be much more influential in public discourse and public policy if scholars and practitioners were better organized. For that we need a big common project, like affecting the direction of the great ship called education: from job-worthy skills toward well-being and a meaningful life.

Barbara Stengel called us (approvingly) a ragtag band rather than a proper scholarly society. That’s what we intend to remain for some time.

Everyone has a trigger

We all can be triggered into experience an involuntary emotion. This is not about particularly fragile or very traumatized people. If you do not have a trigger, you have not lived a life. We all carry treasures and trauma, some much more than others, no doubt. Growing up is as often painful as it is delightful. The self is nothing but an intricate ornament of psychic scars. The trick is to wear it with dignity. Some stimuli will elicit an emotional response you are unable to do anything about.

I lived in the Russia until the age of 29. That is half of my life. It shaped me in all sorts of ways, both good and bad. The emotional bank of childhood memories comes from there. Sometimes a random smell will take me straight to Kulunda Steppe, and my grandfather’s home. The rich, pungent aroma of drying grass at night, the smell of dirt with a tinge of mushrooms, dung and tomato plants. All of it blended with insects chirping, the horse’s soft stomping and a long cow sigh from the barn. Sometimes I can see the ancient floor rug in our apartment on the fourth floor of a white brick building, with a weird number 4/1. I looked for caterpillars in the inner yard’s bushes. Or a mesmerizing yellow light of my first-grade classroom and a hypnotic, calm voice of my first teacher Anna Ivanovna. Those triggers are welcome, for they let me time travel. They allow the soul to be rinsed through with a warm and lazy summer rain.

My Russian life also built up anxieties, over which I have very little control. For example, when someone tells me we must achieve more ideological unity, my gut reacts before my mind does. It feels like violence, even if it was not intended as such. I had enough unity. When I am unable to discuss an idea and am expected to accept it as is, my whole being rebels. When I expected to be silent, and only listen – no matter how worthy the speaker is, no matter how compelling their story is - I tense up. I want to come out and meet that story with my story, so we can find common experiences. When someone expects me to say something I do not believe in, I literally become mute. Those who lived in totalitarian societies can relate to these feelings, and perhaps others can as well.

Like anyone else, I cannot change who I am. We are not in full control of our triggers. The very notion of a trigger implies reaction that is hard to overrule. Most people eventually learn to manage their behaviors, but not all emotional reactions. It is best if we learn to accept that everyone has a stock of those automatic reactions and be tolerant to each other’s quirks and foibles. A human soul is a weird and spooky place; some of its corners are far from tamed.

Imagining the end of the pandemic

The ability to imagine is the most useful feature of human mind. It has limitations, too. For example, many of us are having hard time visualizing the return to campus after the pandemic. We all know we will, but the picture in our minds does not quite come into the focus. The trick it – imagination is fed by sensory perceptions. It cannot produce images out of nothing.

I spent a couple of days on campus for our CARmencement. During the pandemic, the campus looked like a ghost town, with eerie feeling. However, in those two days, it was full of people, brimming with life, sunny and as beautiful as I remember it. Ans yes, suddenly I knew how it will be once we are back. It all suddenly made sense. If you want to trigger your imagination, create a situation that is similar to what you want to imagine. The little trick really helps.

It is amazing how hard it is to change our behaviors, even if it is changing back to what one considered to be normal. The various governments do not help much. In the government world everything takes time to prepare. People who run large social systems always think a few months in advance. They constantly count back from the future horizon to the present. There is always a lag between what the best science have and what is happening on the ground. OK, no surface cleaning apparently needed. But tons of the cleaning solutions are ordered, contracts signed, people hired, money encumbered… Large ships take time to turn. OK, CDC says no masks. However, there are policies that local and state governments have in place. They need to be rewritten, rescinded, approved, communicated, etc. none of that can be done in a day. Here we are wearing unnecessary masks, waiting for the governmental gears to turn. That’s OK, we can wait a little longer.

Do not judge a movement by its fringe

Any social movement, progressive or conservative, national or liberatory, has its excesses. They all develop a fringe that takes things too far. Taking things too far is a part of the human history. There will always be a few people that use the movement’s idea for personal gain and for a power grab. And yes, from time to time the fringe takes over the entire movement, at least temporarily. Something like that is happening with the Republican Party right now, but I am pretty sure it will eventually self-correct or split.

Russian liberals, traumatized by almost a century of left-wing totalitarianism, keep seeing its ghosts in the American and European progressive movements of today. Many were horrified by the MeToo, the environmentalist (hilariously scared of Greta Thunberg), and by BLM. They all make the same mistake of judging the entire movement by its most radical fringe. The error makes one to see real risks, but dramatically overestimate its scope. The fact is, MeToo produced very few excesses, with the story of Al Franken the only high-profile example that comes to mind. With the exception of a few questionable PETA stints, the mainstream Green movement continues to take balanced, sensible approaches. If you look at BLM website, it spells out a program for non-violent change, a very much within the boundaries of mainstream of American politics. Equating the movement with a few looters is unfair to the extreme.

It is not just the Russians; some Americans make the same mistake, taking the fringe to represent the whole. This error is unfortunately amplified by the opposing political parties. It helps to mobilize the base but is self-defeating in the long run. Within each of these and other movements, there are multiple institutional mechanisms and forces to keep the movement from sliding into the margins. If you see a bit of a smoke coming out of your neighbor’s trash bin, do not run around shouting “Your house is on fire, you are going to die a horrible death right now!” Just find the hose and spray some water into the bin. Beware of actual scale of a danger.

And here is what I’ve learned about life so far

The highway called life is crowded, filled with small and smallish things, with accidents, happenings, talks, decisions, encounters - the meaning of each is known, while the meaning of them together is almost always elusive. I wonder – why is this and that, what am I supposed to learn from this conversation, that little drama? This one thought or that one observation, little insights and many errors, conclusions, illusions, allusions. Is this the curriculum? Who designed it? What am I supposed to learn from all that?

You always learn about people. Their thoughts and actions, quirks, and gifts – the world of other people is absolutely inexhaustible and unpredictable. Yes, you see patterns eventually. But it is also a universe consisting of multiple huge worlds, absolutely beautiful in their uniqueness. Every person is a planet, a rich, juicy, exquisitely painted picture of the entire visible universe that is different from any the next person possesses. Only rarely do I get to see this, maybe a couple times a year. I look at faces of people around me and hear many gentle echoes of their worlds subtly talking to each other. This is the music of the spheres, as nuanced and as inexhaustible as a galaxy. I begin to feel what the ancient Greeks meant by agape. The Greeks knew the many forms of love: eros, philia, ludus, agape, pragma, philautia, storge, mania. This one is agape. It is when I can marvel about many others, feel their pain and joy – all at the same time; when I can hum along the great symphony of the human multiverse. Wow, this is how he thinks, that is how she sees the world. People wear their scars like badges of honor, learning, striving, figuring things out, and yet hopelessly lost, just like me. Just like me and so not like me.

The curriculum is also about yourself. You learn your limits and sources of strength, your triggers, pet peeves - from living. We are not born with knowledge of ourselves. The self is a subject of discovery, just like the rest of the world. Children know very little about themselves – this knowledge is panned like gold flecks from a river bed, with about the same dreadful efficiency. The nooks and crannies of one’s soul are as infinite as the worlds of other people. The smells of childhood and the colored pictures of the life story, regrets and memories, melodies and desires – all these can come down as an avalanche, only to get completely still the very next moment. “Oh, this is how this thing works” – you think about yourself, every time surprised at the obvious. How could you live with yourself for that many years, and not know something very basic about your own self? Who knows, who cares, who gives. Life is like travel; the whole point is to find something you did not know was there. Perhaps if you don’t learn anything new about other people and about yourself, it is time to check your pulse and see if you’re still alive.

Does intent matter?

At least three times in the recent weeks I heard something to the effect that your intent does not matter, and the effect of your words or actions on other people that matters. Such a position is superficially appealing, for it calls for greater accountability. People should consider how their actions or words may impact others. And if they do not know what the likely effect is, it is their responsibility to learn, especially if the affected people are of different racial or ethnic group. It is fair, especially within the context of long-term structural inequities, where some groups have been systematically excluded. The exclusion was based, in part, on insensitivity to the dominated groups’ perceptions of what is respectful and what is not. It has always been easy for a White person to remain ignorant about other groups’ perceptions, or simply assume they are the same as his or her. The great Kantian mistake is in assuming that other people want to be treated the same as you want to be treated. In the historical context, it is not surprising that the defense “But I did not mean to offend” is being questioned more and more.

However, you also do not want to live in a moral universe where intent does not matter at all. Ethical judgements cannot exist without gradations. In an “either-or” moral universe, death in a traffic accident is the same as murder. A homeless stealing a sandwich is as big a villain as Berny Madoff who stole millions. A man telling a bad joke is the same as rapist, etc. In real life, various versions of “zero-tolerance” policies (all failures) are softer attempts of regulating society without gradations. The “three strikes” laws are also based on a similar “I don’t want to hear your excuses” fallacy. But if small evil is the same as big evil, then there is no evil at all. If any offense is equally bad, none is really bad. Gradualism in ethics is not an option; it is an essential component of any ethical – and legal – system. An ethical judgement always involves weighing in several components. They may not be equally weighted, but there has to be several. While consequences of an action are very important, intent matters, too. Sorry, you have to listen to excuses if you wish to remain ethical.

Another interesting side effect of the “intent does not matter” approach is giving too much power to the victim. I know it sounds weird; after all, why shouldn’t victims have more say in how much harm they experience? Again, on the surface, it is a plausible ideal. After all, the offended person knows the most about the degree of harm the offender has caused. However, there is a difference between giving more weight to victim accounts and giving all weight. It is not the same thing. In the legal world, it is the ancient problem of protecting against false or exaggerated or additionally motivated accusations. I have been dealing with many students convinced that their accusations against faculty may not be questioned at all. After all they are the victims and must be trusted. The revelation that faculty also have rights sometimes come as a shock.

The problem is resolved (albeit imperfectly) through the legal system, where other people have a say on how such real damages have been done, and what was the intent. At lower levels, we have established various due process procedures, where both the offender and the offended have the right to present their points of view on what happened, and a third party makes a call. If intent is nothing, then the victim’s subjective feeling of the harm is everything. This would be an untenable situation. We have seen how progressive social movements harmed themselves by going too far. It often happens when intent is discounted.

The cost of hygiene theater

In at least two different meetings last week, we discussed campus reopening and safety measures. The question is: should we follow the best scientific advice available right now, or should we also take people’s anxieties and fears seriously? The answer is not obvious. On one hand, we have learned that massive cleaning was a waste of time and money, and that virus does not really spread through surfaces. On the other hand, perceptions of danger are just as real as the danger itself. If we want to people feel safe back on campus, we better show that we care about their feelings. On one hand, we are a university, a place that should always demonstrate respect for science and rational thinking. ON the other hand, we are a caring community, and should not force the science on our people. Some suggest that if we put out too much of the “hygiene theater” we will reinforce some irrational fears and make them worse. However, if we do not put enough, we may lose trust and make the fear worse.

There is also the issue of cost. For example, some people wanted to discuss air purifiers in offices. The Facilities told us they have already upgraded building filtration systems, and individual purifiers are not only useless, but also very costly, if you provide to everyone. However, the good cleaning at least once a day may be not as expensive and not very different from pre-COVID cleaning. The plexiglass barriers are somewhat expensive, but they may have additional benefit of limiting the spread of other viruses, like common cold. We have spent a lot of time calculating various formulas for room capacity, but if everyone is vaccinated, it should not make any difference. Except people are now to used to holding a distance, that it is physically difficult to break out of the new habit. A crowded room will feel dangerous for a long time, even if it is not. After all, many of us lost family members and friends to the virus.

This is a particular case of an old ontological dilemma: what is reality? Is it something that is objectively out there, regardless of what we think? Or is it also how we perceive it? For an administrator, neither option can be acceptable. Like many other similar dilemmas, this one is not going to be resolved without some compromise, without finding a balance. There is still hard truth: the virus is whether spread by contaminated surface or not (It is not). Vaccinated individual can either spread the virus or not (it looks like it is highly unlikely). But that hard pit of reality is covered by soft but significant fruit of human perception that cannot be ignored.

We all are conservatives sometimes

We have much to preserve. The California State University system is an enormously valuable public investment. Despite its faults, the system has almost half a million students. It has been an awesome machine producing hundreds of thousands of capable employees, and good citizens. It provided countless people with middle-class incomes, and a sense of accomplishment. It lifted out of poverty hundreds of thousands of families and helped build the fifth largest economy in the world. It cannot be taken for granted either. Therefore, all of us, administrative types, spend significant time on preserving what we inherited, on protecting the system from numerous potential threats. This includes avoiding legal and public relation calamities, taking care of public money, preserving the delicate balance of interests with the labor unions, etc. I am personally more inclined to emphasize change and experimentation, but the job requires a great deal of defensive play. I imagine that at the higher levels of the hierarchy those pressures are even greater. No provost, president, or chancellor want to screw up what they have been entrusted to oversee. It is not even about personal risk aversion. They all feel the sense of responsibility for this big, expensive, and ultimately useful thing people asked us to take care of.

If you have been waiting for a “but,” it ain’t coming. Some people including me, have been saying that the higher education is heading or is already in a major transformation, and that the survival should compel us to take on more risks. The funding model replying on growing public investments and rising tuition rates does not seem to be sustainable. However, to be fair, we have been saying these things for decades, and the higher ed stays the same, save for an occasional small contraction or expansion. No one knows the future, and the dire predictions should never be confused with reality. Statistically speaking, the future is most likely to lot a lot like the present. That is the problem with any kinds of predictions, especially with prophecies of doom. You cannot sell books and attract attention by saying that things will be… almost the same. In our everyday life, we all often act as conservatives. This applies to even the most radical agents of change who want to conserve things already achieved.

Again, I am personally inclined towards change. This is why I always appreciate having more careful colleagues around me. In an organization, someone has to be pushing for change, while others should be pushing in the other direction. It saddens me to see how the Republican party stopped being a party of conservatives. Where is the party of adults in the room, who asked us to be careful, to not ruin what we have, to avoid reckless spending, to limit the government bloat, to watch for the dangers of social engineering? Instead, we get a bunch of leaders who care about power more than they care about their principles. Instead of fighting for their ideas, they want to limit voting rights, and to ride the xenophobia wave. But that is a tacit acknowledgement that their ideas are bankrupt. That is not true. If they come back to their principles, and communicate them clearly, they will always have a chance to govern. Americans of all ethnic and racial backgrounds have a very strong conservative streak. Both liberals and progressives would benefit from a fair competition from a sensible Right of Center party. Unfortunately, it does not seem to exist anymore.

Perfectionists and slackers in academia

Academia rewards perfectionism, until it does not. Grad school instills in us an internal auditor, an ethical control mechanism against slaking, cutting corners, and just doing shoddy work. We are taught to always to the right thing, and follow the rules out of internal conviction, not because of the threat of punishment. Graduate education is about excellence, and excellent graduates tend to become faculty members, and some of them – chairs, directors, deans, and other university administrators. At some point, many discover that the good old perfectionism just does not work. There are too many things to do, too many reports to write, too many surveys to complete, and too many trainings to attend. It becomes impossible to do it all equally well. One is brought up short by the sudden awareness that the game has changed. One finds oneself holding a chess piece on a tennis court. You are a better chess player, but people seem to be playing tennis around here. It is now about the ability to prioritize, to lose certain smaller skirmishes while trying to win the war.

The internal auditor, however, does not give up easily. It raises an alarm every time one needs to submit a sloppy product or ignore a requirement. The constant buzz of alarm is frustrating, and often provokes us to snap at other people, or create self-doubt, guilt, and other unpleasant experiences. The perfectionist in you does not give up easily. You end up writing that 20-page self-study report no one is likely to read very closely.  You keep asking about some deadlines no one cares to remember anymore. The perfectionism can also make teaching and service overwhelming. I have seen painstakingly designed complex courses that bury their author under mountains of student papers to grade every week. People have been known to burn out on excessive committee work as well. Perfectionism gives a strong short-term high when you admire another excellent piece of work you produce. However, seeing the long list of other things to do will trigger a long withdrawal.

The problem with perfectionism is that it encourages us to spend all the time on defensive play and leaves no time for offense. In other words, we neglect development, moving forward, and simply thinking. Our own personal scholarship also tends to suffer. Perfectionism eats up our time that could be spent better.

Everyone must find the inner slacker and remember where they are. Depending on the task, let the perfectionist run wild, or allow the slacker to do it, or ignore it altogether. Your slacker will whine and complain that something cannot be done at all, it is too hard. And s/he might be right. Not every problem is solvable.

Why some of the most useful technologies are not adopted

There is a whole theory of innovation diffusion, first put forward by Everett Rogers in 1962. We know – more or less – how innovations are adopted. However, there are curious exceptions. Certain very useful and simple technologies are met with incredible wide-spread and inexplicable resistance. Below are just three examples:

• Mail Merge was part of Word at least since 1995, if not before. It is perhaps one of the most useful features in a word processing application. It allows to create labels, envelopes, individualized letters and emails using a spreadsheet or any table.  By all measures, this is a simple feature. You write a letter, link it to a table with names and email addresses – and voila, send hundreds of emails, all different. While many support professionals know and use it routinely, very few regular people do the same. From my experience, many still do not even know it exists.
• Outlook has been around since 2002. The most useful feature it has – you can look up whether people are free or busy, when scheduling meetings. I believe it was available right from the start, if not before. And yet, incredibly, 20 years later we still waste hundreds of hours every year trying to schedule a meeting. The success of Doodle, an alternative scheduler, is a result of a mysterious resistance by so many people to adopt an equally simple Outlook feature (There is an Apple equivalent for Exchange servers). The 20-year-old Outlook calendar is actually way better than Doodle, the work-around. Why, why? I have no idea.
• Google doc is a revolutionary product introduced in 2006, 15 years ago. The whole point of it that multiple people can edit at the same time. You do not have to send multiple versions, wait for each other to edit. No one must take suggestions, and re-enter them into the master document. The feature was so useful that MS copied it for its new Office 365 and did a good job at it. And yet, 15 years later, it is amazing how many people do not dare to write in a doc. They will send emails with suggestions, but will just refuse edit or suggest, or comment right on the google doc.

More examples can be found. People refuse to use very useful innovations with low threshold of learning. Each of these could be learned in under 15 minutes. This cannot be simple laziness or lack of time. I do not know what is going on with these but have a hypothesis. Sometimes an innovation hit a subconscious taboo. People resist without even understanding why. For example, seeing if anyone is busy or not may feel like intrusion into someone’s private life. It is like looking into a diary. Writing into someone’s Google doc feels like physically intruding into someone else’s notebook. Not sure what is going on with the Mail merge. Perhaps it is eerily close to speaking to someone who you don’t really remember or now. The awkwardness is in pretending to be personal and individual, while not being such. It is a fear of being discovered.

We need to employ psychoanalysts in the business of technology implementation – not just user exerts, but someone who understands the ego, its desires, and fears.

Crisis is a harsh but effective teacher

It does not please me to say this, but evidence is undeniable. The pandemic taught us many things quickly. Instead of 5-10 % of faculty who dabbled in online pedagogy for decades, we now have 100% of faculty with online teaching experience. Our campus was unable to replace paper forms for many years, always with a perfect excuse. It was done within a few weeks last Spring. Telecommuting was this complicated, exceptional thing, it is no longer. A huge bulk of our advising was done f2f. Do you remember the huge traffic in the first week of classes? It was not because students came to classes, but because they needed to meet with someone, solve some problems, get help registering. Oh, never mind, it can all be done without coming on campus. And the embarrassing thing is – the technology to do that has been уaround for a couple decades. We have long and serious debates about how faculty tenure and promotion portfolios can be converted to online, and at what cost, and what is the best platform – for at least ten years. Because of the hiring freeze, we were forced to reconsider work duties, and were able to do more with fewer staff. Well, it was done in a matter of few weeks, without much of a fuss. If it continues to go like this, we may be able to figure out the high art of HyFlex teaching, where some of students are f2f, and some are online. That’s a very complex skill indeed.

The truth is – change is painful, and most people do not really want to change. We may say something else, and even believe it, but only urgency can generate real change. Universities avoid conflict and abhor risk. Consider a recent Chronicle piece by Gabriel Paquette, “Can Higher Ed Save Itself?” especially if you are not planning to retire soon. If you think the end of this pandemic will restore tranquility in our industry, think again. We all are exhausted because this trial by fire is hard. And yet, it is very satisfying to look back to the year of pandemic, and marvel at how much we learned and accomplished. Who knew we had it in us?

Ignoraphobia

In Academia, knowing is the currency of the realm. Because of this pressure, some people develop an interesting anxiety that prevents them from ever displaying ignorance, especially about thinks that they by their position are supposed to know. Such people will never admit to their ignorance, and start making things up just to project some, even temporary competency. Ignoraphobes can never say “I am not sure, let me look it up. I will get back to you on this.” Nor can they ever say, “Let me ask someone who knows for sure.”

Of course, sooner or later people will find out that what an ignoraphobe says is not really true. This presents a problem for an ignoraphobe: they have to cover their tracks somehow. What they were compulsively unable to admit in the short-run creates a long-term credibility issue. Only a few moves are available: one can say “I never said that wrong thing.” Well in the age of e-mail, someone will dig up an old e-mail proving you said it. One can change the topic, try to confuse the conversation, or just ignore further inquiries. All of these are not great ways of coping. Accumulated, they tend to ruin one’s reputation and create more general distrust.

This hurts both in teaching and in administration. In teaching, students tend to look up answers right there, and may loose confidence in their instructor. In administration, an ignoraphobe may send colleagues on a wild goose chase, only to find out they did the wrong thing all along. It is especially problematic, when an ingnoraphobe has the actual decision-making power. Their erroneous decisions will always need some further justification.

Like any compulsive behavior, the always-knowing speech is hard to control. Among better coping strategies, try these:

• Delay answering. Ask the other people – can you write me an e-mail about this? There are too many details to cover. This gives you time to do the actual research, without blurting out the half-truths
• State the degree of confidence. For example, say, I am 90% sure that… This allows one to still feel confident, and yet let the door open for a potential error.
• Copy someone who is likely to know, and note “If I am wrong, so-and-so will correct me.” This will still feed one’s compulsion, and yet provide some room for back-tracking.
• And finally, force yourself to say “I don’t know” in low-stake situations. Gradual exposure to the trigger tends to reduce anxiety. 

Administrator as a prophet

Administrators both predict the future and strive to shape it. That’s where our similarity with real prophets end: we experience no divine revelation, no ecstatic exaltation of seeing through the centuries. Instead, imagine different rows of dominoes set to tip from here and now to a point sometime in the few months. The ends of the rows disappear in a fog.

There is no mystery to it, just common-sense knowledge of how the organization’s machinery works and how it does not. It looks like this: students start registering for the Fall in late April. If we do a major revision of it, we need at least 3-4 weeks. If we just need a minor tweak, with codes, it can be done in a week or two. Observe the two different lines of dominoes. If we need an hour break between classes for cleaning, that is a major schedule revision, and we lose a third or more of total classroom space, so we need to keep that 1/3 of all classes online. If we are still at strict 6 feet distance, we must have small groups of students present. If it is more lenient 4 feet, a whole different story. If we ask faculty to rotate students, that is at least 4 different class formats, one of which requires actual training. If we simply schedule smaller sections, that is a lot of money in a shrinking. However, we can probably use the on-time money, but will need to find more instructors, and more rooms for these smaller sections. Again, this is a massive rescheduling effort. Of course, students do not need to know the exact rooms, that could all be done over the summer. Now add such factors as student and faculty preferences, and the county’s unknown health regulations in effect in August. This now looks like a whole field filled with lines of dominoes, going roughly in the same direction, but different in length and shape. Which one do you tip forward? All of these are conditional versions of the future, sort of like in chess, only your opponent is not smart or intentional. It is simply just a bit unpredictable.

The administrative gift of foresight is in guessing which domino clues are feasible, and which will end up in disaster. Some pathways are too complicated, some require too much work, others are too expensive. Some are short and sure, but blunt and will bring more problems than they will solve. The real problem is when we are dealing with unprecedented and can only guess how the gears of the organization will actually turn and how fast. The only way to get better at these forecasts is doing it as a group. The collective knowledge and the ability to predict is almost always better than the individual ability to do the same. Predicting and shaping the near future is a team sport. I am happy to be at a University that clearly understands that.

Too much to manage

Any organization wages a never-ending war against chaos. It commands an army of rules, forms, processes, and procedures to force the naturally occurring complexity in a set of manageable, similar things that can be dealt with in a uniform manner. Otherwise, chaos will take over and make any mission impossible to implement. Chaos is simply complexity that got out of control. Universities, for example have courses, programs and other requirements fixed in catalogues, and schedules that map these out in repetitive time blocks called semesters. Students aided by an army of advisers must turn the complex catalogue information and apply it to their schedules, while taking into consideration their jobs, families, and other obligations as well as availability or scarcity of class offerings. Like in any war, it is important to not underestimate the enemy. Sometimes complexity is too great to manage, chaos becomes inevitable, and it is time to retreat.

Here is one example. Many of our freshmen cannot translate the catalog requirements into a sensible schedule in their first year on campus. Advising notwithstanding, they make so many errors, that the chaos creates real damage to their academic careers, sometimes delaying graduation by years, and sometime derailing their college plans altogether. To reduce the errors, we implemented a program of block scheduling, where every freshman receives a pre-created schedule. This was designed to reduce the errors and relieve freshmen orientation anxiety. That is a wonderful, sensible idea, not at all unique to our institution. However, we discovered that creating over 3000 individual schedules for 64 bachelor's degree programs with 70 concentrations, and registering them all was… hard. OK, it put our resources on the brink of total collapse. Why? – Because the entire university registration system was designed around the minuscule act of a student registering for a course. The system was error-rich, but required no direct management. Once we centralized it, we became like the Soviet Gosplan, a body that was so spectacularly unable to cope with running the huge planned Soviet economy. While market economies are prone to terrible errors, and unintended consequences, they are not trying to manage the unmanageable. In the long run, the distributed self-regulation works. I remember when someone in Gosplan forgot to plan for toothbrushes, and the entire country went into a panic-fueled buying spree that Soviet stores of any toothbrushes for years. Then it was sugar, pantyhose, toilet paper, jar lids, and almost everything else. A contemporary economy with tenths of thousands of consumer products is too complex to manage. Student schedules are very close to that, although the university can figure it out, albeit with much effort. Like any borderline situation, its value is in demonstrating the limits.

Now we are thinking about the Fall re-opening. We do not know what the health regulations will be in effect: do we still need to maintain the 6-feet social distance and an hour break between classes for cleaning? Or will it be just a request to reduce the campus population to a certain level? Will we be asked to impose an absolute cap on class size? We do not know how many students, faculty, and staff will not be able to return for health reasons, and how many will not want to return, and what kind of policies we may be able to have to compel people to return. Most importantly, we do not know when we will know what we do not know now. With seven thousand sections, any major revamp of the master schedule will take many weeks. No one knows what the solution should be, and I am no exception/ However, I am pretty sure it should not involve a team of tired chairs and associate deans manually assigning students to classes and classes to rooms. The quest is for a solution that would allow for thousands of informed micro-decisions, and somehow make the whole puzzle work relatively quickly.

This is just in case you are wondering what they mean by “Planning for the Fall re-opening.”

Seven strategies of successful online teaching

1. Build relations intentionally. Intuitive ways of relationship-building do not work online, therefore you need to apply specific effort. Educational relations generally have two dimensions: one is safety and the other is growth. Students need to feel safe and included first, and only then you can challenge them to grow. In other words, to take a student out of the comfort zone, they need to get into that zone first. It is important to know that the comfort zone is not universal, people of color, of various gender identities, individuals with trauma may experience both comfort and challenge differently.
2. Do not replicate, recreate. Online teaching is never a direct replication of f2f teaching. Even most experienced instructors must deconstruct their course all the way down to learning outcomes, and then rebuild it from scratch, assignment by assignment, assessment by assessment. It is the only way.
3. Focus on we-moments. I am using here Doug Lemov’s model: I do—We do—You, or a bit more detailed, I do­—I with your help do—you with my help do—you do. Online environment works great for “I do” moments, and fine for the ”you do” ones. Unfortunately, you must trick it to perform the “we do” activities. The most common, but not the only way of constructing a guided practice (we do) is a prompt or a clue. It is when a student does something they cannot yet do alone but can do with some assistance. You cannot be over the shoulder of each student to guess how much they are struggling and give them an appropriate hint. What you can do, is break down any skill into a series of gradually increasing in complexity skills and develop a prompt or a clue for each of these stages. This way, you will be invisibly present when students engage in stretching activities.
4. All can see. If you do not want to spend all waking hours providing similar feedback to every one of your students, design a clever way where your most critical feedback to one of the students is heard and seen by all. This will allow you to protect your time. I know at least 3-4 ways of doing it, but you can figure out your own.
5. Explain how you do it. Similarly, students need to see each other think. This is where Bandura extends Vygotsky. A student does not have to experience every cognitive break-through and every error. They can live through them vicariously, by observing others. A whole set of moves can make student thinking explicit, allowing others benefit from observational learning.
6. Micro-assignments. Unlike in f2f course, where you can have a few large assessments, an online course is better served by many smaller low-stake assessments. This is both to reduce cheating, but also to make skill development more granular, and more visible.
7. Low-stakes group activities. Circling back to #1, an online course will be successful with robust peer-to-peer interactions. The significantly decrease stress, encourage community, and provide even more opportunities for the “we do” activities. Just avoid high stakes group projects – in almost all courses, they end in disaster as often as in success. This is risk you do not want to take. Try games, brainstorming, TikTok-sized videos, mutual practice.

Hybrid as default: Imagining a post-COVID university

The year of forced distant learning is revealing two contradictory ideas: One is that meaningful instruction in the online environment is possible, although not easy. The other is that students and faculty physical co-presence for relationship building. My prediction is obvious: the post-COVID higher education will settle somewhere in between. While students and faculty crave on-campus experience, they are not craving all of it. Students will still love to hang out on campus, but not necessarily sit in hot packed classrooms. The need for human connection can be satisfied in fewer hours and trips on campus, without significant loss of learning. I think we should expect the hybrid mode of instruction to become the default. Obviously, there will be expanded online-only programming, and there will be exceptions at the other end, For example, I cannot foresee theater or dance programs going hybrid. But the bulk of coursework will settle somewhere in between. I know this may sound as a simplistic prediction, almost too obvious to matter. However, the most obvious is often the most realistic.

Sac State is engaging in planning for a new campus in Placer County. So far plans look somewhat boring: they for a typical college campus, with need for rooms driven by CSU formulas and matrices developed decades ago. How about envisioning a hub of hybrid instruction? We probably need fewer classrooms, but also classrooms that allow remote participation in instruction. We would need more places for students to work individually or in small groups. It would be nice to integrate cafes, shopping areas, entertainment venues, so life is not as separate from learning as it used to be. As we cannot expect large public investments, perhaps the new campus should also use a non-traditional economic model. Otherwise, it is not clear where they money will come from.

I am just so relieved to start thinking about wonderful mundane and practical things, and stop worrying about the coup d'état.

Trump syndrome or the assimilation bias

One may not think much of Donald Trump, but he seems to be sincere. Sincerity even that of an error is a major part of his appeal. His case is a spectacular example of a particular cognitive deficiency, the inability to accommodate. The basic distinction between assimilation and accommodation is one of fundamental Piaget’s ideas. Assimilation is fitting new knowledge into a pre-existing mental schema, while accommodation is changing the schema to explain the new knowledge. A paranoid mind creates a universal super-schema that is infinitely elastic and can accept almost any volume of conflicting information. To kill your ability to accommodate, accept the following model:

1. I have a unique ability to see the truth.

2. Those who disagree with me are either evil or stupid.

3. Any piece of evidence that contradicts my belief is created by mean people that want to harm me.

The assimilation bias is not unique to Trump, and it is not limited to small children or mentally impaired people. Unfortunately, it is widely spread. The ability to change one’s mind if forced by new evidence is not that common. Millions of Trump supporters are no doubt sincere in their adamant belief that the 2020 election was stolen from them. The reason for that is that assimilation is emotionally painless, while accommodation is never free of cost. Accepting a new cognitive schema almost always involves an admission that you were somewhat wrong before. That implies a certain loss of self-respect. Being right all the time, on the other hand, makes one feel whole. That is what the Trump syndrome is: the assimilation bias fueled by insecurity. Mind cannot be endlessly accommodating; we need schemata to think. But overly rigid schemata weaken our ability to reason and makes our behavior less adaptive.

The problem with the Trump syndrome is other people. A few people disagreeing with you can be easily explained – they just don’t like me and are doing it out of spite. However, when you have a lot of other people disagreeing and presenting conflicting facts, the schema demands more and more elaborate additions and extensions. The overblown rigid schema needs intricate superstructures explaining away the large evil, or large stupidity out there. You really need the notion of a massive conspiracy to hold the whole worldview together. And of course, there is no shortage of conspiracy theories. Without a conspiracy, how would you explain other people?

Thankfully, the assimilatory super-schema is not a stable cognitive construct. It must keep growing to include more and more contradicting pieces of evidence without bursting. The super-schema is powerful, but unstable. It tends to grow more and more absurd branches, like a completely secret conspiracy of tens of thousands of poll workers and country clerks, like the magic ability to create and throw in millions of ballots within hours, like Antifa activists infiltrating the trumpist mob, like over 60 judges, including known conservatives being in on the conspiracy, etc., etc. The more profound is the paranoia, the fewer people around you are willing to share it, and the more “traitors” you will see. Not just Lindsey Graham, or Mitt Romney; even Trump himself is becoming a traitor after his de-facto concession speech. Calling your messiah traitor kills the religion, eventually. The paranoiacs are terrible at building political coalitions.

Because cognition is a profoundly social phenomenon, it includes self-correcting mechanisms. At some point, most people can stop assimilating and start accommodating. They may not abandon their super-schema altogether but will shed some of the most outrageous extensions in order to maintain some socially accepted level of sanity. History shows that mass psychoses almost always recede. Some people believe that the era of social media may present a different situation. I do not think so. The echo chambers of splintered media may slow down the destruction of the Trump syndrome. However, the mechanisms of self-correction are much deeper, they have evolutionary roots. An intelligent species that would be completely susceptible to the assimilation bias would not survive. Well, sometimes it ends with a civil war, but not very often. This shall pass, too.

Instead of vaguely defined and immeasurable “critical thinking,” educators should focus on the assimilation bias. The ability to accept truth even if it is painful is a defining trait of an educated person.

The Deep State does exist, and we are better off for it

It is not what Trump thinks, not a conspiracy of bureaucrats against him. This country has a cadre of civil servants for whom maintaining the democratic institutions is more important than personal interests. They are both Republicans and Democrats, they serve at different levels, some political appointees, and some are career bureacrats. Brad Raffensperger is just one of them. So much focus has been on Trump’s bullying that his responses got lost. He is calm, reasonable, and factual. When he has enough of the nonsense, he basically hangs up on the President of the United States. That took courage and convictions. He is a part of the real Deep State, perhaps the most important of all democratic institutions. Yes, the division of powers works, too – look at the Supreme Court’s mostly honorable performance. Yes, the freedom of the press is important. However, we also saw how close Trump came to overriding the legitimate elections. The last-ditch defense are the civil servants in every state and every county. Their unwillingness to go along with the attempted coup is what made the difference in the end. The irony is that Trump can intimidate a number of US Senators, but not a county or a state election official. The layer of these people is very deep; hence the Deep State metaphor seems to be appropriate.

I think it is time we recognize all these people who made sure the institutions of democracy have been holding under the unprecedented onslaught from Donald Trump and a group of reckless opportunists he was able to gather. The system is holding, thanks to Raffensperger and people like him everywhere. Perhaps a quarter of republican Senators will vote to not certify the results of the elections. However, the rest of them will, and this is the story that we need to focus on. Let’s celebrate the good news: democracy is winning, and authoritarianism is failing.

That works on a smaller scale as well. I have seen countless time when my colleagues override their preferences and make decision in the long-term interest of the institution. They are mindful of the institutional memory, and of setting precedents. They are aware that fair governance is not a one-time thing, it is an institution that needs preservation and cannot be damaged to expediently solve a one-time problem. The depth of the Deep State goes all the way down.

Martial law, official poisoners, and hope

Can’t think of anything other than the crazy, evil things in the news. Trump has been discussing martial law on Friday, willing to throw away 250 years of American democracy. Putin was caught red-handed in an attempt to poison Navalny, the opposition leader. Onу on the killers admitted he was sent to clean Navalny’s underwear to remove traces of the poison. Both men are trying to deny the accusations, and both look like pathetic liars. You could swap these two guys, and they’d be true to their narcissistic, delusional personalities. One can only wonder how such men get to the top. And there is at least half-dozen men like them in charge of major countries today: Turkey, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, India. What dark forces animate their supporters? What evil winds swept over the Middle Earth, bringing the worst epidemic and the worst wave of autocratic rulers?

It is hard to think of the meaning of winter holidays right now. The story of Christmas is that of hope for a fallen world that has no idea about it. The Prophet’s Birthday has a similar message of hope in Islam, although it in November this year. The story of Hanukah is about beating a larger army, and rededicating a temple again; it is a story of hope restored. The Bodhi day is about one man’s resole and hope to reach enlightenment. Solstice is the day of overcoming the darkest day of the year; it is symbolically about hope. These and other holidays are simply reminders. “This is not the shittiest it has ever been,” – they tell us, - “There is always a reason for hope.”

The reminder is always counter-intuitive. When you stare in the depth of the darkness, light comes from where you least expect it to come. It does not come from where you were searching for it; it is always a surprise. You never know, and yet you always knew, there is light, and it just temporarily obscured by some gunk in the Universe’s gears. Happy holidays. Let’s hope 2021 will be better.

What does my signature mean? Or Why are universities so clunky?

We have moved away from paper, thanks to COVID. However, just like before, I often wonder, what does my signature mean on this and that paper? Sometimes it means an actual approval – those are fine. Sometimes my signature only means that in theory, once in a hundred year, I have an authority to stop something from happening. In many cases, the signature means that I am expected to conduct some quality control. The assumption is that if several people will look at a document, someone is more likely to catch an error or impropriety. In fact, I notice that many signatures actually dilute responsibility, for ever person thinks someone else did the checking.

In other cases, my only job is to see if it is kosher, and no one is abusing the system. Almost always a signature means accepting responsibility – if something goes wrong later on, I will be held accountable. And there is a whole class of stuff where someone believes I should be aware of something, so why not ask for another signature. The reality is that at the very end of a paper trail, there is a staff person – very often WITHOUT their own signature line, and without much official authority – who verifies the numbers, checks compliance with policies, and makes whatever the paper is intended to enact to actually happen.

Signatures take time, even in the new world of digital documentation flow. Sometimes they are purely ritualistic – a certain decision “feels” like a dean has to agree to it. For example, I sign hundreds of lecturer contracts. The hiring decisions are fully delegated to chairs, and their support staff. There are too many of them for me to do a meaningful quality control. I also know that payroll office will check after me. So, the workflow goes like this: our departments have their own databases that keep track who has been offered a contract, who is eligible for what, and who has been offered to teach. Then we go into a completely different cycle of contracts and signatures, and after that, someone will punch some keys again, and enter the information into a third database that will eventually result in a paycheck. A completely different flow will trigger access to class rosters, and the ability to give grades, etc. All of this creates a lot of work at every stage, for chairs, at least 3-4 staff persons, and some for me. In theory, one email from Chair to the lecturer and reply to it contain everything we need; “Hey, would you be interested in teaching the Tuesday-Thursday class in the Spring? – Sure, will do.” The name is put in the schedule, and in theory, it should trigger an automatic process, where the lecturer gets paid, and can access Canvas, assign grades. But no, nothing is ever that simple. We make a whole big deal out of it. Every. Semester.

The problem with any university is that we don’t have anyone whose job is to question – why do deans must sign on this? Do we need this whole workflow at all? It is nobody’s job, so it is not done. Business affairs people do not understand academics well enough to question our chains of authority. Informational Technology people understand neither the business, nor student or academic affairs well enough to suggest improvements. No one on campus has a broad enough vision for radical improvements. The president is busy with strategic things, and definitely has no time for questioning every workflow. Vice Presidents are reluctant to intrude on each other’s turf. Moreover, streamlining requires initial investments, and universities are stripped of reserves. A consultant that would understand all these parts of the university in their complex interactions would cost a fortune, because you’d have to hire someone who has been a VP or a similar experience. In other industries, businesses are routinely re-created from scratch, so they often have an opportunity to reinvent their processes. However, the immortal giants like Boeing or GE have all the same problems we have in the academia. The taxpayers and consumers bear the cost. I actually cannot see a good solution right now.

December in the Central Valley

This land makes you wait for it: December, fall, my favorite
season. Stand under a big ginkgo tree, squinting at the autumnal yellow sun;
leaves will float down as hesitantly as snow in my hometown.

This land rewards patience with bright chilled air applied liberally to faces,
wiping off the long summer heat, breezing easy, pleased
with how things turned out in the end.

“How about these colors I just found” – it asks us.
We know, we’ve seen them before, from the same store.
And yet, yes, these are like new, like never seen before.

It is because fall smells excavate my subcortex,
Looking for memories of previous autumns’ smells,
of leaves, fallen because they are fallible, just like us,
of words, half-buried, half-dreamt.

It is time to shrink

In a conversation with one of my chairs, I suddenly realized that the best thing I can do for her right now would be to take less of her time – with anything, really, including most of this conversation. These are not normal times. Not one of the old set of tasks have been deleted, and yet a number of new tasks and challenges appeared. Faculty, chairs are under a lot of stress. Yet parts of the university act as if nothing has happened. They insist on providing support. They schedule trainings and workshops, events, and programs, consultations, improvements, audits and meetings. I have been mildly irritated by all those people, until I realized I am probably one of them. This realization, I must report, did not reduce the irritation.

We all are support units – deans and plumbers, librarians and VP’s, accountants and residential assistants. The magic happens in the classroom (virtual or physical) and few other places where students learn and experience life. The rest of the machinery has only one function – to support. Yet the way it works is that the supporters do not always ask the supported what kind а help do they need and when do they need it. In fact, in many cases those who support have formal authority over those supported. Or they may believe they do. Faculty and department chairs have the bulk of the non-optional work. Classes must have instructors, schedules must be built, grades must be entered and degrees awarded. And none of it is easy under the circumstances. Yet the rest of the campus gets antsy, too. All those support units are trying to be more helpful, do something right now to help. Moreover, they all have their plans, procedures, accountability measures. However, too much help is a very real thing. Helping take time from those being helped.

University administrators are not good at shrinking. Shrinking it goes against all of our mythology of leadership and management. A leader has to be large, visibly present, and affecting good change! In time of crisis, the leader has to be there in the front lines, giving comfort, encouragement, solving problems, and generally leading the troops. Well, all that makes too much noise, and takes too much time. Especially at the point where people more or less know what to do; they just need to be left alone to do it.

I have been deleting a lot of stuff that I was supposed to forward to my faculty, chairs, and staff. Another request to please be present at a webinar, a new exciting opportunity, and sometimes even a demand for information – these kinds of things can wait. Even the legally required training can wait. If you have to do something every five years, it can wait another year or two. When are you are doing anything involving other people, please think about it twice. Not now, at the end of our first ever virtual semester. Not when a good half of my colleagues experience one or another family crisis, with relatives getting sick. Not when their virtually schooled children drive the parents nuts. The rest of the campus needs to learn how to shrink. Sometimes the best thing you can do to others is to remove yourself from their lives.

American Education: The party of choice and the party of resources

Betsy DeVos has been a staunch advocate of the “party of choice” in American education. It believes that giving parents choice will lead to more innovation, and spur competition among all schools, making all education more competitive and more successful overall. Not only Republicans, but distinguished Democrats have been the supporters of this party in the past. The “party of resources” believes that improvement of K-12 education is possible with more resources, better paid and better trained teachers allocated to traditional public schools. Joe Biden’s pre-election platform sits squarely in the domain of the “resource party.” Both of these parties support accountability.

Why did the Democratic Centrists seem to abandon their support for the party of choice in education? For a trumpist, it is evidence of the Left wing taking over the Democratic Party. However, the answer is much simpler. With time passed since the Clinton administration, we have much more evidence. Effectiveness of charter school is still a matter of considerable debate (see a decent review in Wikipedia.) However, the debate is really about the margins. The revolutionizing effect of deregulation ma y people expected did not happen. I don’t think anyone disputes that now. Yes, some urban charter schools can be SLIGHTLY better than traditional public schools. However, the seem to increase racial segregation, and may actually hurt certain groups of kids more than help them. Again, these negative effects are also not very large. The overall outcome of the debate is very, very boring: charter schools do about as well as traditional public schools.

This is one of the few examples where social science may actually have made a real impact on policy. At least, there is a visible shift within the Democratic establishment. Thanks to numerous educational researches who conducted hundreds of studies that made this shift possible. Those of who enter into doctoral programs in education, should know this.

Depolarization of America

Tomorrow night, or a few days later, half of this country will be celebrating, while the other half will be fuming. In close elections, turn-out is king, and therefore both parties engage in the “vote or die” theatrics. Both imply that the world as we know it will end if their side loses. Republicans promise that Biden will turn USA into USSR, complete with the Gulag and shortage of toilet paper. Democrats say that four more years of Trump will turn the US into Republic of Gilead, complete with burning down the White House, and hanging “deviants” from lighting poles. None of this is true, of course. Everyone should go out and vote, but we also need to look at the morning of November 4, or whenever all the votes will be tallied.

There is no moral equivalency. In an irrational and self-destructing impulse, the Republican party has succumbed to the allure of an immoral populist demagogue. Democrats bear a much lesser responsibility for the advanced polarization. This is not about evenly allocating the blame; I am worried about what is to happen next. The truth is that the electoral defeat will not make the other side disappear. And while enormous treasure and efforts were spent on polarizing this country, almost no one is thinking of any effective strategies to de-polarize it. How do you actually come down from the high fever?

Excessive polarization undermines the political institutions that both sides of the conflict theoretically need to preserve. In practice though, the parties use the pro-institution agenda for partisan purposes. For example, Republicans object to the undue influence of unelected top officials (the so-called Deep State theory), perpetually suspect voter fraud, and resent the liberal bias of mass media outlets. Democrats, in turn, resent the accusation. In their view, the conspiracy theories undermine the trust in democracy itself. Democrats point at voter suppression techniques. They also accuse Republican of failure to distance themselves from White nationalism. Both sides do it for the sake of democracy. It is easy to see how such a tug of war can destabilize the institutions. Any political institution is as strong as public trust in it.

It is not clear where the de-polarization agenda would come from. Hopefully the winner, whichever it is, will have enough sense to work on it after the victory. It is tempting to use temporary dominance to completely destroy the opposition, but such a strategy only leads to further polarization. At the minimum, someone has to articulate the common interests: reducing the vitriolic rhetoric, developing a bipartisan plan for strengthening the institutions, reforming both the social media and mainstream mass media, rooting out conspiracy theory mongers from the acceptable public discourse. A lot of things had slipped backwards and need to be restored. The traditional barrier between opinion and news operations had been eroding in both Fox and CNN. Despite the meek efforts to control it, social media remain a vehicle for paranoia-induced theories.

Biden seems to understand this, and has sounded some conciliar tones even before the elections. I just hope he has plans that do not end with his victory speech. Trump, however, is another matter. His whole strategy is built on mobilization through polarization. The depolarization process will probably be postponed for four more years if he wins. Again, I don’t think it would mean the death of democracy. The US has a robust set of institutions other than the presidency.

The core of the de-polarization strategy is NOT in trying to convert each other. It is in emphasizing the common interests, strengthening the democratic institutions, and toning down the rhetoric of mutual political annihilation.

Teaching is not political activism

The Antiracist movement captured the academia, provided urgency, energy and a new focus to our work for justice. Many of our previous efforts with time became benign conversations about culture, broad and homogeneous inclusion, tolerance, etc. Somehow, despite all the critique, the “tourist approach” to multiculturalism remained strong. The antiracist uprising of 2020 changed that dynamics by focusing on one of the two original sins of the American project: Black slavery and extermination of Native Americans.

I have to say that I don’t find anything controversial about including the considerations of justice, including racial justice, in the aims of public education. The worn argument regarding political neutrality of education has been debunked. Neutrality is a conservative position, and education in contemporary society cannot be very conservative. I don’t want to go into a long-winded argument about why that is the case. The simplistic version of it is that societies change too fast for a conservative model of education to be relevant. Education is a huge public sector consuming some 8% of GDP and including a large portion of the population. We cannot afford not to use it for effecting and managing some desirable social change. We can debate which change is desirable, but it is too expensive to be the dead weight. Therefore, if it can help such problems as racism, we should. And if can do it more forcefully and more effectively, we should, too.

The question is how. The antiracist education has a fairly robust theory, but few established practical pedagogical approaches. One of the most problematic areas is the issue of educator’s authority and how it can and should be used for the purposes of antiracist education. In the political arena, the antiracist activism is almost always about confronting the political power, exposing and changing crypto-racist policies, practices, and discourses. A typical classroom is a much more complex environment than any city hall. An anti-racist educator has to confront his or her own and students’ racist attitudes and behaviors. And yet the educator is the agent of power, and students, even if they are ignorant and prejudiced, are also the relatively powerless. I can only imagine how difficult this terrain for faculty of color. The students they see are often both the oppressors and the oppressed: by the virtue of their own identities for the former, and by virtue of being students for the latter. In addition, the students in the classroom are not exactly volunteers. Students cannot walk away if they politically disagree with the instructor. Because the classroom is not a voluntary group, the freedom of speech for the instructor is somewhat limited. To add more complexity, some students will use their protected status to advance prejudice. While it is always tempting to use the full educator’ authority for the greater social good, the indiscriminate use of such power may do more harm than good.

All I am saying is that it is very-very difficult to manage. Teaching is not exactly the same as political activism, although they often overlap. The institutional arrangements and the power tensions are different here. And we all need to develop a common, pragmatic understanding of where the boundaries are and how they are enforced. For that, an open discussion is needed.

The harsh professor syndrome

It happens to those professors who do not learn how to teach and relate to students reasonably well within the first 3 years or so of their career. Receiving one- or two-years’ worth of negative student evaluations is tolerable; one can always use them to grow and learn. However, if they keep coming, the temptation to blame the students becomes almost unbearable. We begin to hear that “our students” are unprepared, immature, do not have good study skills, and need discipline. From such a colleague, we hear that students are too conservative, lacking imagination, racist, and otherwise prejudiced (All of which may be true but our job is actually to help overcome those deficiencies). The afflicted professor begins to talk more and more about the academic rigor, and how it is our job to uphold higher academic standards. They talk about how students need to learn a hard lesson, that harsh unbendable rules will prepare them for future lives and careers. You will inevitably hear how every student should be treated in exactly the same way. You will be told that if a student is homeless and lives in her car with a child, she must turn on her paper exactly before the midnight on Friday, like the syllabus says, otherwise it would be unfair to other students. And the entire world may actually end iа you show the slightest flexibility. You will hear that a student’s parent struggling with COVID is not an excuse for a missed class without a doctors’ note. And you will hear those stories again and again. They become incantations more than communication.

Our brains are very good at generating thousands of excuses to justify harshness toward students. As Tolstoy once wrote, “We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.” And vice versa, we do not like people we are mean to. Each individual excuse may have validity to it, and we all make fun of some of our students. However, the give-away sign of the fully blossoming harsh professor syndrome is the obsessive discussion of reasons why it is just, right, and necessary to be an asshole. The syndrome is not caused by intrinsic personal traits, although there may be a predisposition. No, it is a result of failure to teach, and the strong need to explain away the failure. Chronic failure is incompatible with professional and personal self-respect. It creates a tremendous cognitive dissonance. The dissonance can be resolved in one of two ways: by learning how to teach and/or relate to students, or by developing the harsh professor syndrome.

The tragedy of the syndrome is that it is very rarely reversible. Once a person develops it, her or his teaching and relationships with students fall victim of the self-fulfilled prophecy. One starts expecting all the bad things from students, and of course, they manifest in one’s classroom more and more readily. I am not writing from some point of moral superiority. If not for the great support from my senior colleagues at Bowling Green, I could have developed it too. They never supported the bad student talk, but strongly supported me in my growth as a teacher. I am so glad we have such a strong culture of teaching here at Sac State; it is the only way to avoid developing the syndrome. However, ultimately, it is a personal responsibility to stay away from it. Doctors never complain to each other how sick their patients are. Neither should we ever allow each other to blame student for the fact that they need teaching.

Churches, unmasked

Some 19 per cent of Americans do not believe masks are effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19. Many of those are Christian, and churches remain significant virus spreaders. Short of being an actual public health expert with access to raw data, how would you know if masks are or are not effective? Of course, a non-scientist would have no knowledge about this. Scripture does not address viral infections. To claim knowing something inaccessible to you is a case of pride, which Christianity have considered sinful for its entire existence. Jesus himself taught about humility, and the Church fathers after him did the same. St Augustine famously wrote that the way of truth is “is first humility, second humility, third humility.” And also, he thought that “Pride is the beginning of sin.”

One may consider the anti-masking attitude to be an expression of personal courage, of not fearing death. However, since mask wearing intends to protect others rather than just the wearer, the argument does not work. A good Christian is supposed to care about his or her neighbor first. It is also important to remember than once you are sick, someone has to take care of you risking their lives, pay for treatment, and cover for you at work and at home. Being courageous at someone else’s expense strikes me as the most un-Christian behavior imaginable.

Some churchgoers claim personal freedom as justification for defying the government regulations regarding masks. Again, personal freedom and the opposition to the civil authorities may be OK as stand-alone secular values. The problem is, they are not very Christian. The entire project is based on the call to submit to God, and remove fallen humans from the center of the universe. If you know anything about Christianity, it does NOT offer an anthropocentric vision of the universe. The European Enlightenment – yes, it is partially anthropocentric. But Christianity is theocentric; it is a religion after all. It distinguishes between the political liberation and the spiritual one. So, stop fighting the imagined government conspiracy, and start thinking about your own soul. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and to God the things that are God's." You are free to sign up for a militia, but don’t drag Christianity into it.

Yet another folk theory is that faith will somehow protect the believer from contracting the virus. That is a naïve and ignorant position. You are not going to drive 100 miles an hour on a residential street assuming God will protect you and others from you, right? God did not sign a contract with you, saying that you can do anything dangerous and stupid, and he would rescue you, as long as you say a few prayers once a week. If you think that you’re somehow covered by a divine insurance policy, you have missed the last 5,000 years of religious life. The Jews discovered the folly of idolatry (that is an imagined contractual relationship with God) and tried to warn the world. Well, that was not entirely successful either, as New York’s Hasidim just demonstrated.

The sad truth is that many people who claim to be Christians do not care to know the first thing about Christianity, its values and its intellectual tradition. While there are many different branches of Christianity, not one of them can explain why a believer should harm others, or why one should claim to possess knowledge one cannot possess. If you simply want to make a political point, do it outside the church, or start paying taxes on church income.